Constructed Topography

Repeatedly working from the same site – an active limestone quarry in the south of France, Tooney Phillips’ work is primarily abstract in nature. For the last twenty-five years, drawing on her experience as an architect and her fascination with this strange and unfamiliar landscape, Phillips has developed a body of work including printmaking, collage and photo-montage, where she has explored the age-old question of how to record three-dimensional space in two dimensions. The spatial characteristics of the quarry, that have been created over 2000 years with the repetitive cutting out of blocks, allows for this exploration of form and space.
 
Taking the representational pictorial space and physically cutting into it, she takes it apart and then reconstructs it, playing with the physicality of the paper. Through her work Phillips describes the contours, the very edges of the space(s) that can be found within the quarry’s geometric formation.